Understanding SERPs is crucial for making money online. They are generated by search engines and contain organic, human-added, and paid listings. Companies use SEO techniques to rank higher in organic results, but abuse is possible. Paid listings are separated from other listings and are the primary way search engines make a profit.
If you are interested in making money online, it is absolutely crucial that you understand the importance of a SERP. Also known as a search engine results page, a SERP is the web page that a search engine like Google generates when a user searches for a particular term. It features the titles of web pages that match your keyword query, links to those pages, and a brief description of each page’s content. A SERP typically contains three types of listings: results automatically generated by a search engine spider, results added by a human moderator, and paid listings which are often advertisements for a particular product or service.
The ads that have been added by the search engine spider are often called organic search engine results or natural search engine results. Search engine spiders are programs that browse the web and automatically index pages according to a predefined set of criteria. To help their pages reach the top of these organic search results, companies often hire writers and consultants who are knowledgeable in search engine optimization techniques. While this strategy can be more expensive than simply buying a paid listing in the SERP, the investment is often seen as a vital component to building a successful online business.
While search engine spiders are a very effective way to index web content, this system has the potential for abuse. Unethical website operators have been known to create sites that do not provide useful content and exist solely to generate advertising revenue on a SERP. For this reason, listings that have been added to the search engine directory by a human moderator or editor are preferred by many Internet users as these results are very likely to be relevant to a particular keyword query. Yahoo! is the best known search engine that makes use of human moderators and editors when creating a SERP.
The listings that a business has paid to include in the SERP for a particular keyword query are often advertisements for a product or service. These paid ads are the primary way a commercial search engine is able to make a profit. However, to help users make better decisions about which results are most relevant to their search, paid listings are separated from other listings. In Google, for example, paid listings on a SERP appear in a sidebar in the right column of the page. In Yahoo!, these directories are known as Yahoo! Sponsored Search and displayed at the top and bottom of the page in a blue box.
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